Utility, customer go round and round over meter

The South Kitsap power meter in dispute with Puget Sound Energy.
LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN

SOUTH KITSAP - Tucked deep into the woods in rural South Kitsap stands a shed.

Next to the shed stands a pole. And on the pole is a PSE electricity meter box.

Occasional shed resident Chris Sherrod doesn't like the box. He thinks PSE is clocking more juice than he's using.

He found numbers he believed proved it. But he got no relief from the Bellevue-based utility after making lots of calls. A PSE tech person examined the box and said it was fine.

So he called the press, a move that quickly got PSE's full attention.

"Mr. Sherrod has presented an issue with his meter that we are taking a closer look at," PSE spokeswoman Dorothy Bracken said late last week after she and another PSE person hastily connected with Sherrod.

"The cheating bastards," Sherrod said of PSE.

Sherrod, 58, usually lives with his mother at Taylor Bay, but occasionally stays here in this shed situated among the tall, fragrant grasses and lazy shady firs. He built it a couple of years ago after trees fell on his home during a storm.

He's an incredibly light electricity user at the shed — maybe the hotplate or his computer. His last bimonthly bill came to $17.39.

But he spotted something unusual on his PSE account. It had zero kilowatt hours used for some days he knew he was using electricity, and on other days the amount was more than he thought he'd used.

"My meter's got the hiccups," he said.

It wasn't a big money thing, but he was curious.

He requested a day-by-day printout of the numbers of kilowatt hours used from PSE. When it arrived, he found something even more troubling.

Of the 100 entries between May 8 and Aug. 15, half ended in the number 5, much more than normal odds. Again, it was often in the thousandth-of-a-kilowatt-hour column — for example 0.105 — so it was a tiny amount of money.

But in the cases in which the number ended in 5, the 5 was rounded up on the bill that resulted. The number 0.105, after it had gone through the PSE billing system, became 0.11 charged to Sherrod.

The Kitsap Sun did a random check of a half-dozen numbers on Sherrod's usage readout that ended in 5 and the subsequent bill. All had been rounded up.

Strangely, numbers that ended in 4, 3, 2 or 1 weren't rounded down.

Sherrod said that because his account was so tiny, he might have uncovered something suspicious in PSE's software billing system.

"The conspiracy theories just keep going over all over the place," he said from his aluminum lawn chair in front of his shed. He suggested customers, especially bigger users, look at day-by-day readouts of their kilowatt usage to see if they have an inordinate number of 5's that are rounded up on their bills.

Bracken of PSE had no immediate explanation.

"That's an area we are definitely going to look at," she said.

She could explain the days showing no use.

Every midnight, kilowatt usage is transmitted electronically from boxes in rural areas to PSE banks in Kansas. Sometimes things like a van parked too close to a box can temporarily interrupt a transmission, which results in a bigger transmission later, she explained.

When Sherrod began noticing irregularities in his account, he installed his own meter box directly under PSE's. His number often showed less use, he claimed.

Bracken thought PSE's box at Sherrod's shed might be getting old and inaccurate and needed replacing. Though she was mystified about all those number ending in 5's, she didn't suspect her employer was intentionally skewing things.